whisper small
Overview
Highlights
- Optimized balance of inference speed and transcription accuracy
- Strong multilingual support for global speech-to-text applications
- Low VRAM requirements for efficient edge deployment
- Robust performance across noisy audio environments
- Permissive Apache-2.0 license for flexible commercial integration
Usage
# Install Hugging Face transformers
pip install transformers torch
# Load model with transformers
from transformers import AutoModel, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModel.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small")
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small")
Hugging Face Download
We recommend downloading the model via the Hugging Face CLI or Hub SDK.
Guidance:Before downloading, install huggingface_hub with:
pip install -U huggingface_hub
CLI Download
Download the full repository
huggingface-cli download openai/whisper-small
Download a single file to a local folder (e.g. config.json into ./dir)
huggingface-cli download openai/whisper-small config.json --local-dir ./dir
See the official docs for more CLI options
SDK Download
# 模型下载
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
model_dir = snapshot_download('openai/whisper-small')
Git Download
Make sure git-lfs is installed first
git lfs install
git clone https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-small
To skip LFS large-file downloads, use:
GIT_LFS_SKIP_SMUDGE=1 git clone https://huggingface.co/openai/whisper-small
Model files are hosted on the Hugging Face Hub — download directly via HF CLI / SDK / Git, not through this site.
PyTorch / Transformers Usage
Install Transformers
pip install -U transformers torch
Load the model and run inference
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM, AutoTokenizer
model = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained('openai/whisper-small')
tokenizer = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained('openai/whisper-small')
Full Documentation
---
language:
- en
- zh
- de
- es
- ru
- ko
- fr
- ja
- pt
- tr
- pl
- ca
- nl
- ar
- sv
- it
- id
- hi
- fi
- vi
- he
- uk
- el
- ms
- cs
- ro
- da
- hu
- ta
- no
- th
- ur
- hr
- bg
- lt
- la
- mi
- ml
- cy
- sk
- te
- fa
- lv
- bn
- sr
- az
- sl
- kn
- et
- mk
- br
- eu
- is
- hy
- ne
- mn
- bs
- kk
- sq
- sw
- gl
- mr
- pa
- si
- km
- sn
- yo
- so
- af
- oc
- ka
- be
- tg
- sd
- gu
- am
- yi
- lo
- uz
- fo
- ht
- ps
- tk
- nn
- mt
- sa
- lb
- my
- bo
- tl
- mg
- as
- tt
- haw
- ln
- ha
- ba
- jw
- su
tags:
- audio
- automatic-speech-recognition
- hf-asr-leaderboard
widget:
- example_title: Librispeech sample 1
src: https://cdn-media.huggingface.co/speech_samples/sample1.flac
- example_title: Librispeech sample 2
src: https://cdn-media.huggingface.co/speech_samples/sample2.flac
model-index:
- name: whisper-small
results:
- task:
name: Automatic Speech Recognition
type: automatic-speech-recognition
dataset:
name: LibriSpeech (clean)
type: librispeech_asr
config: clean
split: test
args:
language: en
metrics:
- name: Test WER
type: wer
value: 3.432213777886737
- task:
name: Automatic Speech Recognition
type: automatic-speech-recognition
dataset:
name: LibriSpeech (other)
type: librispeech_asr
config: other
split: test
args:
language: en
metrics:
- name: Test WER
type: wer
value: 7.628304527060248
- task:
name: Automatic Speech Recognition
type: automatic-speech-recognition
dataset:
name: Common Voice 11.0
type: mozilla-foundation/common_voice_11_0
config: hi
split: test
args:
language: hi
metrics:
- name: Test WER
type: wer
value: 87.3
- task:
name: Automatic Speech Recognition
type: automatic-speech-recognition
dataset:
name: Common Voice 13.0
type: mozilla-foundation/common_voice_13_0
config: dv
split: test
args:
language: dv
metrics:
- name: Wer
type: wer
value: 125.69809089960707
pipeline_tag: automatic-speech-recognition
license: apache-2.0
---
Whisper
Whisper is a pre-trained model for automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation. Trained on 680k hours
of labelled data, Whisper models demonstrate a strong ability to generalise to many datasets and domains without the need
for fine-tuning.
Whisper was proposed in the paper Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision
by Alec Radford et al from OpenAI. The original code repository can be found here.
Disclaimer: Content for this model card has partly been written by the Hugging Face team, and parts of it were
copied and pasted from the original model card.
Model details
Whisper is a Transformer based encoder-decoder model, also referred to as a _sequence-to-sequence_ model.
It was trained on 680k hours of labelled speech data annotated using large-scale weak supervision.
The models were trained on either English-only data or multilingual data. The English-only models were trained
on the task of speech recognition. The multilingual models were trained on both speech recognition and speech
translation. For speech recognition, the model predicts transcriptions in the *same* language as the audio.
For speech translation, the model predicts transcriptions to a *different* language to the audio.
Whisper checkpoints come in five configurations of varying model sizes.
The smallest four are trained on either English-only or multilingual data.
The largest checkpoints are multilingual only. All ten of the pre-trained checkpoints
are available on the Hugging Face Hub. The
checkpoints are summarised in the following table with links to the models on the Hub:
| Size | Parameters | English-only | Multilingual |
|----------|------------|------------------------------------------------------|-----------------------------------------------------|
| tiny | 39 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| base | 74 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| small | 244 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| medium | 769 M | ✓ | ✓ |
| large | 1550 M | x | ✓ |
| large-v2 | 1550 M | x | ✓ |
Usage
To transcribe audio samples, the model has to be used alongside a WhisperProcessor.
The WhisperProcessor is used to:
1. Pre-process the audio inputs (converting them to log-Mel spectrograms for the model)
2. Post-process the model outputs (converting them from tokens to text)
The model is informed of which task to perform (transcription or translation) by passing the appropriate "context tokens". These context tokens
are a sequence of tokens that are given to the decoder at the start of the decoding process, and take the following order:
1. The transcription always starts with the <|startoftranscript|> token
2. The second token is the language token (e.g. <|en|> for English)
3. The third token is the "task token". It can take one of two values: <|transcribe|> for speech recognition or <|translate|> for speech translation
4. In addition, a <|notimestamps|> token is added if the model should not include timestamp prediction
Thus, a typical sequence of context tokens might look as follows:
<|startoftranscript|> <|en|> <|transcribe|> <|notimestamps|>Which tells the model to decode in English, under the task of speech recognition, and not to predict timestamps.
These tokens can either be forced or un-forced. If they are forced, the model is made to predict each token at
each position. This allows one to control the output language and task for the Whisper model. If they are un-forced,
the Whisper model will automatically predict the output langauge and task itself.
The context tokens can be set accordingly:
model.config.forced_decoder_ids = WhisperProcessor.get_decoder_prompt_ids(language="english", task="transcribe")Which forces the model to predict in English under the task of speech recognition.
Transcription
English to English
In this example, the context tokens are 'unforced', meaning the model automatically predicts the output language (English) and task (transcribe).```python
>>> from transformers import WhisperProcessor, WhisperForConditionalGeneration
>>> from datasets import load_dataset
>>> # load model and processor
>>> processor = WhisperProcessor.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small")
>>> model = WhisperForConditionalGeneration.from_pretrained("openai/whisper-small")
>>> model.config.forced_decoder_ids = None
>>> # load dummy dataset and read audio files
>>> ds = load_dataset("hf-internal-testing/librispeech_asr_dummy", "clean", split="validation")
>>> sample = ds[0]["audio"]
>>> input_features = processor(sample["array"], sampling_rate=sample["sampling_rate"], return_tensors="pt").input_features
>>> # generate token ids
>>> predicted_ids = model.generate(input_features)
>>> # decode token ids to text
>>> transcription = processor.batch_decode(predicted_ids, skip_special_tokens=False)
['<|startoftranscript|><|en|><|transcribe|><|no